Dreaming on Both Sides of the Brain: Discover the Secret Language of the Night

By Doris E. Cohen and Christiane Northrup

A dream is not just white noise or something that happens to you while you sleep. Dreams are the secret language of your unconscious. This book will teach you how to: • Unlock the secrets of your personal dream language • Explore and interpret the meaning of your dreams • Harness the power of the brain to uncover a life of greater richness and meaning   So often when we awake we find that our dreams have either evaporated like mist or seem to be just on the edge of our memory. Many people cannot recall their dreams at all. Cohen has developed a 7-step process to let you tap into the rich repository of your subconscious: 1. Recall and record. 2. Title your dream. 3. Read or repeat aloud. 4. Consider what is uppermost in your life right now. 5. Describe your dream's objects and qualities as if you were talking to a Martian. 6. Summarize the message from the unconscious. 7. Consider the dream's guidance for waking life.   Drawing on years of clinical experience and her familiarity with Freud, myth, and sacred writings, Cohen presents a program that results in a life of abundance, texture, and self-awareness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781612834092

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Dreams have been described as messages from the Divine, manifestations of repressed emotion, and experiences from the collective unconscious. Edgar Cayce suggested that they come from spirit and healing, and involve spiritual growth. In a sense, all of these explanations have an element of truth to them. So why write this book? Because, with all that has been written on the interpretation of dreams, no one has yet brought this very important activity down to a level of practicality that can easily be applied to everyday waking life. It is as if someone were composing beautiful music or weaving the most beautiful stories for us every single night, and we were simply ignoring them. As a result, we seem to have lost our sense of the magic and amazement contained in our dreams.

One of the best definitions of dreams I've ever encountered comes not from a professional discussion at all, but from an article in U.S. News and World Report: The experience of dreaming is as clearly universal as a heartbeat, and as individual as a fingerprint. I love it. It is simple, direct, and, like the world of the unconscious, offers rich possibilities for both the scientist and the poet. But what is it saying, really?

Not only do we all dream; we dream all the time. Research has shown that we dream five to eight dreams each night. Still, I very often hear people say: Oh, I never dream. Or: I used to dream, but I never dream now. No, no—it is simply that they do not remember their dreams.

Dreams are images and sensations, stories and inspirations. People are inspired in dreams to do the most amazing things in waking life. The single most recorded song in history—the Beatles' Yesterday, recorded hundreds of times by different artists, in different arrangements—resulted from a dream that inspired Paul McCartney to write the song. He simply woke up one morning, recalled the melody and lyrics he had heard in the dream, grabbed a pen, and wrote them down! The rest is history. Of course, Paul McCartney is not alone. When Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, found himself struggling to come up with a way to thread a needle that would work with his machine's design, he had a dream that many others might have dismissed as a nightmare. He dreamed he was being held captive by a group of cannibals who were preparing to feast on him. As they danced about a fire, he noticed that their spears, which they were banging rhythmically up and down against the ground, featured small holes near the spearhead. When he woke, the vivid image of the holes and the rhythmic up-and-down motion of the spears led him to realize that installing the needle with the threading hole near the point that pierced the cloth would allow it to stitch continuously without tangling the thread. It was this discovery, inspired by a dream, that made his invention possible.

So where do these dreams come from? Throughout history, people have assumed many things about dreams. Some have belittled them as simply random collages of mental scraps, while others have subscribed to the grander notion that dreams are gifts from some external, spiritual force. These views began to change as people became better educated and developed their individual opinions and relationships. In fact, while dreams may at times have some aspects of both random collages or prophecy, the vast majority of your dreams are composed of information that exists in your individual unconscious.

The interpretation of the symbols that occur in our waking lives is, in fact, a link between our typical, conscious, left-brained way of interpreting information and the possibilities of interacting with the world from a right-brained perspective that is more actively engaged with the unconscious. The left brain represents your waking life, your conscious world. It comprises your analytical self and masculine energy, and controls the right side of your body. It represents the energy of the men in your life. Dreams, however, are mostly right-brain functions. The right side of your brain regulates your dreaming life—your unconscious world, your intuitive self—and the feminine energy that controls the left side of your body. Thus, when you dream, you're engaged with the energy of the women in your life. When you wake up, you cross from the unconscious world of the right brain into the conscious world of the left brain.

This crossing occurs both literally and figuratively. There is a band of nerves that connects the left brain and the right brain. Think of it as a bridge. When you wake, you cross that bridge from your dream life, where the language is symbolic—pictures, sensations, feelings, colors—to the conscious world of your analytical self, where the language is, well, actual language—verbal, literal, rational. Moving from the visual, symbolic world you inhabit each night into the verbal, literal world you inhabit during the day is as jarring as it might be to move in an instant from China to the United States. Imagine reading the rich poetry of China and suddenly finding yourself reading the Wall Street Journal as you taxi through Manhattan. Would you want to approach your Manhattan experience having discarded and forgotten all you'd learned while reading in China? This is, in a sense, what happens if you don't practice crossing the bridge between your right brain and your left brain. You wake up each morning having no tools with which to interpret and learn from the lessons that were presented to you in your dreams. And all those lessons and messages are irretrievably lost unless you learn to recall and explore them.

We all have the ability to recall more of our dreams, to understand them more deeply, and to apply all that we learn from them to our daily lives. Practice, or repetition of the process, can make you not just conversational in the language of symbols and the unconscious, but, with persistence, fluent in it. This fluency can help you make changes that will lead you to live a richer, fuller life—and it can do so quickly and easily. Moreover, by changing your own life, you begin to exert a measurable and positive influence on those around you and, ultimately, on all of humankind.

My own experience with the dramatic extent to which repetition and practice can help advance your understanding of dreams and the unconscious bears this out. I used to remember only about three dreams a year of the approximately 2000 to 3000 dreams each of us actually has each year. Many years ago, however, I joined a study group of like-minded people who gathered weekly to share and discuss their dreams, their goals, and spirituality in general. Each of us brought descriptions of our dreams for discussion. And this was how I learned both how to recall dreams and how to interpret them in ways that were helpful and directly applicable to my waking life. With practice and over a remarkably brief period of time (no more than three weeks), I learned to remember at least three dreams per week. With repetition and practice, I went from recalling three dreams a year to recalling over 150 dreams a year. While this is still just a fraction of the number of dreams we actually have each year, it was an encouraging start that led me to develop a process for dream recall and exploration that works like a charm.

This process is actually very simple. In fact, the only reason why most people don't regularly recall and analyze their dreams is that no one stresses to them the importance of dream recall. In our busy and technology-driven society, we are not trained to remember; we just don't have any practice remembering. In some cultures, it is traditional for people to sit around the breakfast table and speak of their dreams. People in these cultures have been practicing dream recall all their lives and can share and discuss their dreams with ease. In our culture, on the other hand, we wake up, jump out of bed, shower and get dressed, turn on the news, catch the latest blaring headlines, note the traffic and weather reports, listen to world events and terror alerts—and before we are even aware of it, we're totally absorbed in the waking world and our dreams are gone. Our engagement with the world of the unconscious is cut off, finished. We become completely immersed in the left side of our brains without having given ourselves a chance to pause, to cross the bridge between our unconscious and conscious worlds, and to consider what we've experienced and all we can learn from it.

Or maybe you do remember an occasional dream. Perhaps you've worried all day about a dream you had of your house catching fire and consulted a so-called dream dictionary to try and glean some meaning from the seemingly random images that came to you in that dream. Well, that, in my opinion, will get you nowhere. That is not what this book is about. While this book is about discovering what the images in your dreams mean to you personally, at its core, this is a book about learning the language of your unconscious, the language of symbols. Like the Divine, the unconscious speaks to us in symbols. By improving your fluency in the language of symbols, you not only become better able to interpret your dreams, you also establish a continuity between your conscious and unconscious worlds that enables you to use the language of symbols to understand your waking life better. Dreams are an entry point—the conduit through which you can begin to learn this language.

Unlike a spoken language, however, the language of symbols can not be contained in one convenient dictionary or grammar from which you can learn their meaning. There is no reference manual in the collective unconscious to help you accurately interpret your dreams and the symbols in them. Your personal and unique language of symbols cannot be defined by arbitrary definitions that someone else compiled. So-called dream dictionaries are thus worthless—although they still may have an element of truth in them that can mislead you into taking them seriously. In this book, I will not tell you what your dreams mean. You do not need anyone else to tell you what they mean. Rather, I want to help you discover their meaning for yourself—much as I have learned to do.

Over two decades ago, during a therapy session with a female patient, I had a sudden insight into what her dream might mean. I shared that insight with her and suddenly everything fell into place for her—the pieces fit together and made perfect sense. Everything we needed to understand her dream was right there, available to us. We applied the dream information to what was happening in her life and she left feeling much better. From that day on, every time I work on dreams, I remember the insight that encouraged me to connect the dots. And I have tried to bring that insight to bear on the more than 15,000 dreams I have worked to interpret since then—for my patients and clients, as well as for my family and friends. This important insight led me to develop the seven-step process presented here.

In Part I of this book, you will learn about the physiology and psychology of dreams, then explore the language of symbols in which they speak to us. In Part II, we'll examine the seven-step process for dream recall and exploration in detail and see how each step can lead you closer to understanding your dreams' symbolic messages. The steps are intentionally simple and easy to follow so that you can make them a part of your everyday routine without them becoming burden-some. Briefly, they are as follows:

In Part III, we'll examine how these steps have worked for others. In Part IV, you will begin to apply them to the interpretation of your own dreams.

Your dreams are valuable because they hold information from your unconscious that is directly related to you. Once you've recalled a dream, there are simple tools you can use to begin to make sense of it—tools that I will share with you in this book. My goal is to teach you how to approach your dreams using simple steps that can guide you through your own dreamwork. By following these simple steps, you can come to a clearer knowledge of your own unconscious life and, through that knowledge, gain a better understanding of your life in the world.

Part I

The ABCs of Dreaming

CHAPTER 1

What Are Dreams?

Most people pay no attention to their dreams because of the prevailing notion that dreams are nothing more than noise in the brain—vestiges of waking experiences that linger in the nervous system. Let me be frank: That assumption is simply false. Yes, there are different patterns of waves in the brain, some of which relate to dreaming and some of which relate to our waking lives. But just because we do not yet know what dreams mean or their precise source does not mean that they are nothing but noise to be dismissed. This is one of the great failings of modern medicine—the assumption that not knowing the explanation for something means that there is no explanation for it.

The Tradition of Dreams

According to the Bible, dreams are prophetic and come from God. In ancient Egypt, priests traveled through different levels of consciousness to access what they referred to as the magic library in order to help petitioners interpret particularly vivid dreams. In ancient Greece, dreams were believed to come from Asclepius, the god of medicine. People suffering from imbalance or illness petitioned priests of Asclepius to interpret their dreams in order to heal them.

In modern times, Sigmund Freud opened the door to consideration of the unconscious by suggesting that dreams emerge from the unconscious as expressions of sexual urges and aggression suppressed in waking life. In fact, he referred to dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. However, to interpret dreams as nothing more than disguises for our aggressive and sexual urges is intensely reductive and limits our humanity to a single dimension. After all, we are so much more than sex, than aggression. As expressions of divine energy, we are dreams, hopes, ideas, spirituality, play, and